[Walter Soyka]

I don’t think you’d need to write an expression; you could do this with 3D layers.

Place your foreground and background layers like you normally would. Parent the background to the foreground, and make them both 3D. Add a camera. Adjust the anchor point of the background in the Z-axis only.

You will control the parallax effect through the camera settings and the z-anchor on the background.

Walter Soyka
Principal & Designer at Keen Live
Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak Blog – What I’m thinking when my workstation’s thinking

[Walter Soyka]

The good news for the tracking in this case is that he’s just bringing in a mask of the same footage (albeit with different alpha), so you wouldn’t have the same perspective issues as you would if you were trying to track in other footage.

That said, I certainly didn’t mean to imply that tracking would be a magic bullet. There will still be plenty of roto to do, but hopefully he will be able to get a decent track and save himself some roto (or have success with Chris’s method).

Walter Soyka, Principal & Designer
Keen Live: Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak: Our Blog

[Walter Soyka]

[Kevin Knutson] “Right now I’m working around this by duplicating the layers of interview, and creating a custom mask around the eyes on the lower layer (therefore, the background gets keyed, but the eyes do not). Works fine, but takes way too long since the subjects head moves a lot. “

You might be able to save a bit of time with motion tracking.

Walter Soyka, Principal & Designer
Keen Live: Motion Graphics, Widescreen Events, Presentation Design, and Consulting
RenderBreak: Our Blog

[Walter Soyka]

I never really thought about my VPN in the context of the cloud before, but it’s a really relevant connection to make. While I love the convenience of the cloud model, and rely on it for email, contacts, and calendar, it’s still lackluster for production work.

I travel extensively for business, but it’s impractical to carry all the media for all my active projects at all times. Since I installed my VPN about a year and half ago, it’s completely changed my capabilities while I’m on the road—it’s like having my entire office in my briefcase.

With my laptop and hotel or cafe wifi, or even my cellular aircard, I can connect back to my file server or my workstation in the office from anywhere. I can see my workstation’s screen, tweak a set of ultra widescreen motion graphics, re-render and compress them, and pull down the deliverable files. I don’t need to carry a monster workstation and terabytes of storage everywhere, and I can accommodate unexpected requests, no matter where I am.

I only wish VPNs were simpler to configure on both sides, so I could establish on-demand bridges from my network to my clients’ networks.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

[Nicola Giannini] “I was wondering if I buy 2 normal dvd players, same model, and I use one remote control pressing play. Do they start together?”

They would start roughly together, but you shouldn’t much accuracy from this setup. Also, if one of the decks misses the flash from the remote control, you’re out of luck.

If you’re considering a DualHead setup, you’d probably be better off precomposing the two movies together into one wide movie; then you could use a simpler player like Playback Pro, PVP, or even just Quicktime Player to run the playback, and you won’t have to worry about the sync drifting at all.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

Like Dave said, there is no “best” compression setting. Your compression settings will be determined by your delivery requirements.

With that in mind, AE has many strengths, but compression is not among them. It is not capable of multi-pass encoding, which is critical for quality output with highly-compressed, variable bit-rate encodes. I tend to render to lossless image sequences or lossless Animation in AE, and then use a third-party compression utility. There are many contenders here: Compressor, Episode, Squeeze, ProCoder, etc.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

Check out Aharon Rabinowitz\’s tutorial on Text to Sand. You could adapt this, with larger particles, and moving in the Z-axis.

https://mobi.creativecow.net/article/rabinowitz_aharon/red_giant_sand_transition

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

I’d use a particle system — you might try Trapcode Particular or Form.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

[Rob LaRose] “When dealing with large sequences (5000+ frames) over a network share, this impacts the Finder severely… Can the Finder be configured to ignore the thumbnail icon info, even when it IS there?”

MacPilot might be able to do this – it has an option to disable custom icons on network volumes. There’s a trial so you could see if it will help with your setup.

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production

[Walter Soyka]

Also, video encoding is not AE’s strong suit — for example, it cannot do multi-pass encodes. You’d be better off rendering a lossless movie from AE and compressing it with a dedicated compression application. encoding

Walter Soyka, Principal
Keen Live, Inc.
Presentation, Motion Graphics & Widescreen Design
RenderBreak: A Blog on Innovation in Production